🕶️ Tech exodus: can Europe stop the IPO bleed to the U.S.?

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Six bullets of updates

1. 🌳 Elon Musk continues battles in Brazil over Starlink and Amazon rainforest conservation, facing potential fines of $100M.

2. 🏥 Spotify's Daniel Ek opens Neko Health body-scanning clinic in London; 14% of users required medical treatment.

3. 🚨 Bitcoin ATMs have become a hotbed for scams, with the FTC reporting increased fraud cases and consumer losses.

4. 🌍 Oxylus Energy achieves a sustainable breakthrough, creating e-fuels for aviation and shipping, with a target to supply 10 million gallons annually.

5. 🚗 Volkswagen is introducing its ChatGPT voice assistant to U.S. vehicles, expanding on its CES 2024 announcement.

6. 💡 Mayfield allocates $100M to AI incubator, AI Garage, aimed at ideation-stage founders building "AI teammate" companies.

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Claude vs. ChatGPT—The enterprise showdown

Anthropic has introduced Claude Enterprise, a new subscription plan for its AI chatbot, Claude, tailored for enterprise customers. This move positions Claude Enterprise as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, which launched about a year ago. The platform allows Claude to function as a company-specific AI assistant, capable of answering questions, creating graphics, web pages, and even processing large amounts of data.

Despite playing catch-up to OpenAI, Anthropic aims to differentiate Claude Enterprise with its advanced capabilities and tailored features. The large context window enables the processing of extensive documents or code, making it particularly useful for complex business needs. Anthropic has also assured customers that it does not train on Claude Enterprise customer data, addressing privacy concerns. However, the startup faces the challenge of achieving widespread adoption to make the enterprise model profitable, especially as AI developers are under pressure to reduce API access costs.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Alchemist Accelerator | Deadline: September 6 | San Francisco

2. Crash Course in Financial Modeling | September 11 | Webinar

3. Startups and Business Networking Event NYC | September 11 | NYC

4. mHUB MedTech | Deadline: September 12 | Chicago

5. Financial modeling bootcamp for startup founders | September 16-20 | Bootcamp, Live

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These companies just raised money

1. 🚀 Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, raises $1B to advance safe AI development.

2. 🌱 Dutch clean energy investor SET Ventures secures a €200M fund to boost digital tech innovations.

3. 💸 Ghana's digital lender Fido secures a $30M Series B round, further boosting microloans to underserved markets.

4. 🌐 Ecuadorian CRM Mercately raises $2.6M in pre-seed funding to expand in Latin America and enhance its AI tech.

5. 💳 Puntored raises $2M to expand cross-border transactions in LatAm, aiming to boost services for 18M+ users.

6. 📈 Brazilian adtech Basemaker raises $300K, led by DOMO.VC, to expand its network of 3,500 creators and enhance ad targeting.

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Europe’s IPO SOS: Stop sending our startups to the U.S.!

European stock exchanges and startup associations are urging policymakers to strengthen the EU’s IPO market to encourage European tech companies to go public at home rather than in the U.S. In an open letter to European finance ministers and the European Commission, key players like Deutsche Börse, Euronext, and associations such as France Digital and the European Startup Network called for reforms to the EU’s capital markets union. They propose measures to increase financing options for growth-stage venture capital firms, incentivize investments in European companies, and improve financial literacy across Europe.

The letter highlights the challenges faced by European scaleups, which often opt for U.S. stock exchanges due to better access to capital. Despite producing some of the world’s best startups, Europe struggles to retain them, leading to a loss of economic benefits. The letter also points out that in 2021, the U.S. saw more tech IPOs than Europe did over the entire period from 2015 to 2023.

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Software Patents are Stupid